This gorgeous shimmering world
Did you say it's made of waves?
Hello friends
The sedge warblers have arrived. I caught my first sight of them at the weekend, a single pair, perched among the scraggle of dead stems of last year’s growth along the side of the burn. I couldn’t help calling out to them, ‘Welcome, welcome back!’ The next morning I stepped outside and heard their clamorous ratcheting call, a bright shimmer of sound cutting through the soft rush of water.
Spring in Orkney is all shimmering, of both sound and light. The clear skies we’ve had in recent weeks have rung with effervescent sunlight and the calls of skylark and curlew. Rippling wind-driven waves of grass glitter and sing like a green sea. The dark afternoons of winter seem unthinkable now, a dream we once had, long ago.
The glittering is everywhere. It glistens in the bays, dances over the loch, iridesces inside breaking waves, casts mirror sheets of silver across the beach.
I find myself reaching for the gleam of silver in the studio, the glint of metal leaf, the soft iridescence of mica, the warm glow of gold. Colour alone is not enough. I want surfaces that dance with light.
This is also the time of year I find myself reaching for the poem ‘Light’ by the Orcadian author and filmmaker Margaret Tait, one I have almost by heart. She seems to capture this joyous dance of light on water, the gift of it, the delight, after the long winter.
from Sarah Neely (ed.), Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings (Carcanet, 2012), by permission of the publisher
I’m not alone in my lightstruck daze.
This comes from a recent social media post by the author Robert MacFarlane:
Our verb “to shimmer” comes from the Middle English “shimeren”, meaning “to shine with a veiled, tremulous light”.
Shimmer is both highly dynamic and specific to the observer, inflected as it is by angle of illumination and angle of perception; utterly bespoke to a subject position in space and time.
It is easy to relegate iridescence purely to the realm of the aesthetic. But…I have come to think of it less as a form of beauty and more as a mode of being: life, re-located to the interface; relation in action; existence as process, not substance, weaving and unweaving itself in a continual becoming. World itself, shining with “a veiled and tremulous light”. Shimmer is ravel and unravel, shimmer is friendship, shimmer is teeming not lonely, many not one, also not only.
Shimmer is movement in relationship, the world in its continual becoming and falling away as it ignites and subsides, ignites again, always changing.
Waves of light entangle with waves of water as we watch from our shores. We try to grasp what we are seeing, our need for fixity, for certainty, frustrated.
As the poet Tim Lilburn writes
‘The world seen deeply eludes all names, it is not like anything. it is not a sign of something else. It is itself. It is a towering strangeness’
To catch this gorgeus, shimmering world in a painting is impossible, a ridiculous task.
And maybe that’s the point.
The Life Raft Co-Creating Community
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That’s all for this week!
Sam
This week the corncrakes have arrived with cuckoos and I’ve seen a tern. Last night sandmartins skimmed the sea ahead of me as I swam towards the sun set.
What a beautiful poem by Margaret Tait, thank you for sharing it. And Robert Macfarlane on shimmering is superb, as usual. And all this reflected in your art. Wonderful.